Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I have a really interesting presentation for you. What happens in a studio after dark? This week we’ve been putting together two whole new studios here. Late last night I walked over to the piano and it sounded so beautiful in my studio I just started recording.
I didn’t even turn the lights on!
I think you’re going to appreciate what I played. Interestingly, this idea of doing things after hours in a recording studio is nothing new. Studio time used to be very expensive, and even today to get a good room with good acoustics and a good piano is tough. A lot of times bands or musicians come in after hours when everything is quiet and dark, and it can be a very inspiring time to make music which you can hear for yourself.
That’s a little bit of what can happen after the studio is closed. You can’t choose when you will be inspired. So, a lot of these things can just go by the wayside and nobody ever gets to experience them because no one’s there. But the beautiful thing about a studio is that you can record! So that’s what I’m going to do for you with my new studios and loyal audience of subscribers, for which I am so grateful! You can join the Living Pianos Patreon to get even more! I figure this is the time to share my music with all of you. I hope you enjoy it!
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I have a really interesting presentation for you. What happens in a studio after dark? This week we’ve been putting together two whole new studios here. Late last night I walked over t
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the importance of setting goals in your piano practice. There are 3 distinct ways of practicing the piano depending upon what you’re trying to achieve. I have an extended video about this on my Patreon channel, which you’re all welcome to join. But I’m going to give you a little taste of it because it’s so important!
Knowing what you’re trying to achieve is a prerequisite for getting anything accomplished when you sit down to practice.
Whether you’re learning a piece of music to memorize it, or you’re trying to develop your sight reading, or perhaps you are working on improvisation skills, these are all important skill sets. So, here are some tips from my Patreon channel for you.
Piano music is extremely complex compared to almost any other instrument.
You have to have a unique way to approach learning music on the piano. For example, if I were to recite a series of twenty random numerical digits, it would be difficult for you to remember all of them. Even if those numbers were repeated several times, you would still struggle to commit all twenty digits to memory. But if I gave you only three digits, it would be very easy to remember them. Then, I could give you three more digits, and three more after that connecting as you go, you could learn those twenty digits in just a few minutes! Because, there is only a certain amount of information your brain can assimilate at one time. That is the secret to memorizing piano music, or anything else!
Look with your eyes, not your head.
When sight reading music, if you need to glance at your hands, do not move your head. It takes too long. Just look down with your eyes instead. Your eyes are quick! Trust your feel and and your ears when sight reading rather than trying to look at your hands.
Keep Your Eyes on the Score
When I was much younger, my father was performing the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall. One day he asked me to accompany him in his studio, since he had two pianos. He put the music in front of me and I felt overwhelmed – all those flats and so many notes, a whole orchestral score reduced for the piano! At that time I could barely sight-read anything. But, I just kept my eyes on the score. I missed more notes than I got, but I got through it! I never lost my place in the score. From that moment on, I knew I could read anything, and I’ve been getting more and more of the notes ever since! So, that’s the secret, keeping your eyes on the music. The best way I’ve discovered to have the discipline to do that is playing with other musicians.
This is just a taste of what’s available on Patreon.
I hope this has been enlightening for you! It’s so important to utilize different methods of practice depending upon what you want to accomplish. That’s a really important subject that I wish all teachers would show their students. If you enjoy exploring pianos and piano playing, you may want to join my Patreon family which offers you even more videos and the opportunity to be part of the creative process. These videos are for you!
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about the importance of setting goals in your piano practice. There are 3 distinct ways of practicing the piano depending upon what you’re trying to achieve. I have
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how important it is to double check your work when practicing the piano. If you’ve ever seen any of my videos on how I practice, you know I break things down to the smallest parts. I take small sections and study the notes carefully, just in the right hand. I figure out the rhythm. Then I count to make sure everything is secure and figure out the best fingering. Then I study all the other details, the expression, the slurs, the staccatos. I look back and forth dozens of times until I have it securely memorized. Then I do the same long process just with this tiny phrase on the left-hand part until that is secure, going back and forth, double and triple checking. Finally I play both hands together. That’s the hardest part! Naturally, there’s a lot of back and forth in that process making sure it’s right. Then I go on phrase by phrase until I have the whole piece memorized connecting phrase by phrase as I go. After all of that, I go back and study the score agan! I take my foot off the pedal and play through really slowly to double-check my work. And yet, with all of this, I still discover things I didn’t catch in the score!
I recommend going back and forth a great deal, particularly in the formative phase of learning a piece.
As I’ve said so many times before, unlearning is much harder than learning. So you must constantly reference the score at every stage of your practice. Even when you think you have a piece beautifully memorized on performance level, go back to the music and play excruciatingly slowly. I bet you will find things you didn’t know were there. After all, there are tens of thousands of details in even a short piece of music. When you consider notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression, it’s mind boggling that we can learn music at all! That’s why I recommend the method that I just described.
Try it for yourself!
So, any of you who have pieces really solid, go through your score as I just mentioned. Go slowly, using no pedal, reading every detail, and see what you discover in the process. I think it will be richly rewarding. Better than that, be sure to double, triple, quadruple check your work as you learn so you don’t have to unlearn things later. It will save you vast amounts of time in the long run.
I hope this is helpful for you! If you enjoy exploring pianos and piano playing, joining my Patreon family www.patreon.com/robertestrin. It will offer you even more videos and the opportunity to be part of the creative process.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how important it is to double check your work when practicing the piano. If you’ve ever seen any of my videos on how I practice, you know I break things down t
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “The Importance of Fingers on The Piano.” It seems obvious. But there are actually three parts of the body that come into play when playing the piano: The fingers, the wrists, and the arms. I have an extended video series on my Patreon channel on this subject. I’m going to give you a free taste today. I hope you enjoy it!
The first thing we have to talk about is how to approach the keyboard.
Sometimes, you see people sitting really close to the piano, and it strangles them. So you want to make sure you’re far enough away. And you don’t want to sit with the bench right behind your knees. You want to be able to have flexibility because sometimes you need to reach from one end of the keyboard to the other. You want to be comfortable!
When you look at the keyboard, you see white keys, and you see black keys. The white keys extend all the way forward. The black keys are set back. But, the white keys also extend all the way back. Why am I bringing this up? This is really important. Often I will see beginning students placing their hands on the keyboard where they can only reach the white keys. Then they have to move their hands in and out for every black key. What you want is to keep your hands at the point at which black and white keys meet. This is the appropriate place to keep your hands, generally.
It’s important to curl your fingers.
If your fingers are stretched out, some are far longer than others. So that’s one of the main reasons for curving your fingers. This way you keep them all in alignment with the keys and you don’t have to go in and out with the thumb every time the thumb has to play. This is very important. It might be obvious to some of you, but this is worthy of mentioning.
You can see there’s so much to piano playing, and identifying what parts of the body come into play is critical for being able to solve technical and musical challenges. I hope this is enjoyable for you. If you enjoy exploring pianos and piano playing, joining my Patreon family will offer you even more videos and the opportunity to be part of the creative process. These videos are for you!
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “The Importance of Fingers on The Piano.” It seems obvious. But there are actually three parts of the body that come into play when playing the piano: The fin
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Why You Must Find Your Place in the Score When You Make a Mistake.” Say you’re playing a piece and everything’s going fine. Suddenly, you make a mistake you never normally make. So, you just want to go back to the beginning and go through it again. You probably will get through it okay the second time around. But you’re missing an incredible opportunity.
Whatever you missed has some level of insecurity
I know how hard it is to find your place in the score. You just want to go back and pass that point. But if you take some extra time with the music, you can find where the confusion was that caused the problem. This will prevent future problems. You might get it right nine out of ten times, and every time you miss it you go back and think, “I know I can get this.” But when you do go back, you’re missing the opportunity to find out what the problem was and secure the memory so that it never happens again.
My recommendation to you is to take the extra time, even though it is more difficult
I understand how hard it is. It’s even hard for me! Sometimes I’m practicing a piece of music and I lose my place. It’s frustrating. I get it. But I take the time because I know it will help me in the long run. No matter how long it takes, find where you are in the score. That way you’ll be able to forever eradicate the uncertainty you have in that section of the piece. It will never plague you again! I hope this is helpful for you.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com,Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Why You Must Find Your Place in the Score When You Make a Mistake.” Say you’re playing a piece and everything’s going fine. Suddenly, you make a
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Tempo Must be the Lowest Common Denominator.” What does this mean? You may hear a performance that starts at a nice fast tempo and everything’s going great. Then the performer gets to a section they don’t know quite as well as the rest of the piece, so they slow down in order to make accommodations. Maybe they’ll speed up again when they get to a part they know better. This is a a terrible way to perform, but I understand the temptation. If you know a piece and you can play most of it at a nice tempo that sounds great, but there are one or more parts that you can’t quite play up to tempo, you might want to play everything up to that point at a good tempo and slow down for the sections you are struggling with. But, in a performance, you never want to do that. So, what can you do in order to correct this?
If there are just a few key sections of a piece that you can’t quite play up to tempo, work on those sections!
Zero in on the parts of the piece you can’t play up to tempo and work with a metronome. Set the metronome at a tempo you can keep up with, then slowly increase the tempo to get those sections up to the speed of the rest of the piece. Better yet, work until you can play them even faster than the rest of the piece! Then the weakest parts of your performance become the strongest parts. But if you ever find yourself in a situation where you don’t have parts of your performance up to speed, you must take a tempo at which you can play the whole piece, including those parts. This is very important if you are performing. At a piano lesson, or something of that nature, it’s not really necessary to do this. A teacher will understand if you haven’t quite gotten everything up to speed yet. But in a performance, be sure to lock in the right tempo!
How do you find the right tempo for your performance?
Think of a piece you’re playing where you have a couple of sections that you have really put work into, but your performance is still not secure. Listen to yourself play it. Then find the speed at which you can play those sections comfortably and make that the tempo of your piece. You will give a much more convincing and satisfying performance that maintains tempo throughout, rather than changing tempo to accommodate parts you can’t play as fast. You might think that it makes you sound less impressive because you can play some other parts so fast. But believe me, it will be much more enjoyable for the listener and they will be more impressed with you for giving a more cohesive performance.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Tempo Must be the Lowest Common Denominator.” What does this mean? You may hear a performance that starts at a nice fast tempo and everything’s going g
Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin with a really interesting subject today, “How mistakes in performance are like driving on ice”. I’ll never forget when I was a young child starting piano lessons with my father, Morton Estrin. While he taught piano at Hofstra University, he also had a huge teaching studio attached to the back of our house. We had a terrace on top of it. We had a lot of fun there. That’s a subject for another video! But what I want to tell you is about recitals my father had in his studio. Monthly, he would feature different students. Some of his students were incredible concert pianists who went on to illustrious careers.
In June, he would have his student recitals for everybody else who were not up to the level of playing a whole recital. That’s where I first got my feet wet in performing. I remember how terrifying it was because you practice and practice. You get used to playing your pieces. Then you get in front of people, and everything feels totally different! Something goes wrong, your hands are sweating, and everything seems surrealistic, exaggerated, almost like being in some kind of dream state.
But it can be like a nightmare when something goes wrong.
So, how do you deal with such a thing? And what am I talking about, mistakes being like driving on ice? It’s a very good analogy. Before I tell you about this analogy, let me share something with you I’ve mentioned before about mistakes in performance and how to deal with them appropriately. The way I sometimes describe it is, if you just keep going, most people aren’t going to notice mistakes. People who are intimately familiar with the score will probably notice. But even if they are:
If you keep the music going, that’s key because it keeps the performance enjoyable.
That is the important thing. It’s like going to see a motion picture. If you were watching a film and suddenly there was an edit which jumped back or forward even a fraction of a second, it would be jarring. And that’s what happens if you lose your rhythm or continuity in a musical performance. So, how is this like driving on ice?
If you’re ever driving a car on ice, as soon as it happens, it’s an unnerving feeling, because when you turn the steering wheel and nothing happens. Press the brake, no response! And so what do you do? Do you just go wild trying different things? Do you put the car in reverse? No, you don’t put it in reverse! You don’t start over-steering or hitting the brakes like crazy. Instead, you realize that you’re just going to keep going in that direction like it or not. Eventually, you’re going to hit dry ground and you’re going to gain control of your car.
It’s exactly the same thing in musical performance. Something goes wrong. Of course, it’s horrifying, just like driving a car and losing control. Even though your life isn’t in danger, you don’t feel that way. You feel like your life is flashing before your eyes! You’ve got a whole audience looking at you and even though everything went perfectly in practice, suddenly you find yourself in this horrendous situation.
The best thing you can do is keep your fingers moving.
Keep any part of the score you can remember, even if it’s a mishmash of notes, until your fingers and your ears can piece together where you are, and you keep moving forward. That’s the secret for getting through mistakes in performance. You never stop and correct them. This creates a real problem because in practice, of course, you always stop and correct mistakes because that’s what practicing is about. Performance is a completely different situation. I’ve talked about the necessity of practicing performance. You have to practice performing or else when it finally happens, you’re not ready for it. You can first try recording your playing on your phone or other device as if it’s a performance and see if you can generate some excitement that way. Then play for family members, trusted friends, then maybe groups of people, until finally you’re ready to do a live performance. At any time, even if you’re with a group of friends and something goes wrong, don’t stop and say, “Oh, I can play this perfectly. Let me start it over.” No.
Make it a performance!
This is an ideal opportunity to iron out what you’ll do in an actual performance when something inevitably goes wrong. And I’ve got news for you. You might think that concert pianists know the music so well, nothing ever goes wrong. That’s not true. There are always catastrophes! I don’t care how much you practice and how great you are, things will happen, whether it’s memory or something, where the piano doesn’t feel quite right and you find yourself in the wrong place, not feeling comfortable.
So, remember, just like driving on ice, don’t freak out! Just keep going until you get some traction in your music, just like in the car, and you’re going to be just fine. Try it the next time you perform. I’m very interested in any of you who have had this kind of experience. And for those of you who haven’t done this before, and you try it, let me know how it works for you. I’m really interested! Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource. See you next time!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin with a really interesting subject today, “How mistakes in performance are like driving on ice”. I’ll never forget when I was a young child starting piano lessons with my father, Morton Es
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five questions, then go back and give you the answers. You can see how well you’ve done on this. Also, you can email me and let me know any thoughts you have about these questions.
The first three questions are true or false.
1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false?
2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false?
3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false?
The next two questions are multiple choice.
4. Why are there repeat signs in music? A.) They provide performers with flexibility of timing for programming.
B.) It saves paper!
C.) They help composers increase their output without having to do extra work.
5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned? A.) Twice a year is perfect because of seasonal changes.
B.) Having your piano tuned once a month keeps it in tune best.
C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly, every time you play it.
Here are the Answers!
Now we’re going to go back and see how well you did on these questions. Here is the first question, once again:
1. If you buy a new Steinway piano, it will go up in value. True or false? This is a really tough question. If I just had a choice of true or false, I would say true. Now, you might wonder, how can this be? Let’s think about this. My grandfather bought my father a brand new Steinway baby grand in 1939. He paid $900 for it. That same model Steinway now sells for around $80,000. So yes, if you keep it long enough, it’s going to go up in value. But one thing to consider is inflation. Of course, condition is of paramount importance. I rebuilt that particular Steinway of my father’s, so it’s worth quite a bit. But if a Steinway is completely thrashed over the years, if it’s been subjected to the elements, it can have very little value. So, it’s really kind of true or false, depending on the conditions.
Here’s how it can be false.If you buy a brand new Steinway piano, and then just a few years later you want to sell it, you’re going to take a loss because it takes a long time for the yearly increases in the list prices and the sale prices of Steinway pianos to overcome the new versus used value. Like when driving a car off the dealer parking lot, you know that it’s going to lose a tremendous amount of value immediately. The same is true with pianos. But if you keep the piano long enough, the new ones keep going up, so you could be in pretty good shape, provided you take good care of it.
2. Concert pianists practice scales and exercises for many hours every day. True or false? A lot of you are going to be really surprised about this one. The answer is false. You might think concert pianists practice scales, arpeggios and exercises relentlessly. At some point in every concert pianist’s life, they have spent countless hours working on scales, arpeggios, octave exercises, thirds, trills and other technical studies. This goes on for years. But with touring concert pianists, they are so busy learning repertoire. They get such precious little time to practice. So when they’re practicing, they’re going through their programs, their concertos, their chamber music. Sure, they’re going to spend some time with scales, arpeggios and exercises, but the vast amount of the time they spend is rehearsing and practicing for upcoming performances. They don’t have vast amounts of time to practice exercises and scales every day.
3. If you see the Yamaha name on a piano, you can be assured that it is a good quality mid-range instrument. True or false? This is false. Yamaha is a very large music company. In fact, they’re the largest music company in the world! They have pianos on every conceivable level. Most Yamaha pianos you find out there are good mid-range pianos like the U series uprights and CX series grands. They’re good quality pianos for the money with a sweet spot of price and performance, so they’re very popular. But there are also Indonesian-made Yamahas that are entry-level, promotional-level, bare bones instruments. They are well made, of course, but they are far from what I would call fine instruments. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SX and CF series of Yamaha pianos that can be more expensive than Steinways. These instruments are meticulously crafted to the highest possible standards. So, the name Yamaha doesn’t tell you much about the level of piano you’re looking at.
4. Why are there repeat signs in music? Believe it or not, the answer is B.) It saves paper! Now, you might wonder if that’s serious. It is. Here’s the thing about repeat signs. Sometimes you’ll have one edition of a piece with repeats and you’ll have another edition of the same piece with the repeated music printed out in the score. If you saw the repeat notated, you wouldn’t think of leaving it out. But with repeat signs, somehow people get the feeling they are optional. Repeats are an intrinsic part of the composition and composers do it not only to save paper. Think about composers back when they had to write with duck quills. That was no easy task. Anything to save time was a godsend for them. I’m a firm believer in taking repeats. If you find a piece of music where the repeats don’t make sense and it seems too long, consider that maybe your tempo is too slow. The repeats are put in there for good reasons and they make the structure of the piece gel.
5. Ideally, how often should your piano be tuned? I consider twice a year to be the minimum. My father always had his pianos tuned once a month, and yet, by the end of the month they were out of tune. Believe it or not, the answer is C.) Your piano should be tuned constantly every time you play it!
Think about going to a concert featuring a guitar player. Between each song they tune the guitar because it’s going out of tune little by little. Well, so is your piano! It’s just not practical to tune it constantly. At my father’s recording sessions, as well as many other pianists’ recording sessions, the tuner is there. When they hear any notes going out of tune, which can happen at any time, there will be a break in the session, and the tuner will touch-up the few unisons that are out of tune. In a perfect world your piano would be tuned every day! That might be a surprise to some of you, But in recital halls at music conservatories, it’s not unusual for pianos to be tuned daily.
How well did you do? Do any of you have different ideas about these subjects? I know a lot of these questions are subjective in how you answer them. I hope this has been enjoyable for you!
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we have a piano quiz! You can take this quiz below. It should be a lot of fun! It’s not very long or very difficult. There are just five questions. I’m going to ask all five ques
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Can You Play Expressively on a Portable Piano?” I am presenting an award-winning digital piano for you. I first saw the Casio Privia PX-S1000 and S3000 when it was introduced at the NAMM show, the huge, annual, international music trade show in Anaheim, California. I knew immediately that I wanted to buy one for myself! You might wonder why. I have all kinds of pianos. I have the top-of-the-line Casio Grand Hybrid and my beautiful semi-concert grand Baldwin SF10. Why would I need this? Well, with the Casio Privia PX- S3000, you just take off four thumb screws, and you’ve got a 24-pound piano you can take with you anywhere! It even runs on batteries! And I was blown away by the sound. The on-board speakers are really nice, the action feels great. I just love this piano! I even got one for my daughter! I think it’s an ideal piano for a lot of folks. And It’s only a few hundred bucks. How can you beat it? Casio has been winning awards like crazy on these pianos. It’s really pretty remarkable.
What’s the difference between the PX S1000 and the PX S3000?
There are more sounds and rhythms on the 3000. But you get the same action, the same speakers, the same high quality piano sounds on both. You also get the addition of a pitch bend wheel and a couple of continuous controllers on thePX S3000. It also has 700 sounds, which is massively more than the 18 assorted sounds on the PX S1000. But if you just want piano and keyboard sounds, the 1000 is a great choice.
There’s so much to love about this piano. It has Bluetooth, so you can use the speakers to stream music from your phone and play along! You also get the incredible Chordana app. This app gets you to all the functions of the piano easily. If you’ve ever used a digital piano, trying to do splits, layers, adjusting the touch, and other functions on a little screen, you know how difficult it can be. On this piano, you just use an iPad or your phone, even an Android phone, and you get to all the functions right in front of you! It even has music education software built in. It’s really pretty amazing.
There have been some questions about the action on this piano. I think the action is stellar for a piano of this type.
One of the challenges with any digital piano is being able to fit an action into a compact package. This is such a sleek cabinet, it’s unbelievable how they fit an action in here. So the question is, can you play expressively on this piano? If you want to know more about the Casio Privia PX S1000 and S3000, there are lots of great videos online. But, today, I’m going to focus on whether you can play expressively on these pianos.
In the accompanying video, I played a little bit of Chopin’s B-flat Minor Nocturne, a piece that has all sorts of flourishes, fast notes, and slow notes, to see if it’s possible to get good control out of this digital piano. You can watch that here:
So, if you want a piano that you can take anywhere, there’s even a backpack that you can pop this thing in. You can take this piano to gigs, to friends, even out to the park to play the piano! I can’t think of anything more fun than this, a piano you can take anywhere!
I’m interested in your opinion. Did you think that was expressive playing? Any of you who have these pianos at home, I’d love to hear your comments.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Can You Play Expressively on a Portable Piano?” I am presenting an award-winning digital piano for you. I first saw the Casio Privia PX-S1000 and S3000 when
